Wolfenstein 3D - A Classic MS-DOS FPS as a first test version download for the Amiga 1200 via BSZili!

In 1992 id Software released the incredible first person shooter ' Wolfenstein 3D ' for MS-DOS which featured a unique 3D game engine with multiple enemy types such as Nazi soldiers, dogs, and multiple weapon types to defend yourself with such as guns and knifes. It is a game that is still loved to this day and as such we were excited to find out that BSzili has released a very early test version of the game with the target system being an A1200 with some Fast RAM, no CPU accelerator required!

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Although I haven't had the chance to load up my Amiga to play this awesome game but according to the creator of this fine version of Wolfenstein 3D, only does it require an 68020 14 MHz processor, but it also needs atleast Kickstart 3.0, an AGA chipset, 1 MB Chip RAM, 2 MB Fast RAM, about 3 MB free disk space and finally you need the Wolf3D 6-episode registered data files (*.WL6) except CONFIG.WL6. Although AdLib sounds and music, EHB 64-color mode and Spear of Destiny is not supported but planned! Here's what BSzili has to say about the game!

A long time ago I experimented with a Wolfenstein 3D port for the CD32, but concluded that the raycaster is simply too slow and abandoned the project. I recently saw some videos of Wolf3D running on 286 machines, which got me thinking: an A1200 with some Fast RAM might just be fast enough for the game. You would assume the A1200 is faster than a 286, but there's one crucial component missing: the VGA card. This means no chunky modes, no fast dedicated video memory, no drawing multiple pixels with a single write, etc. You also can't do self-modifying code on the 68020+ without disabling or flushing the cache. Throwing some fast RAM at it could offset this.

I cleaned my old port, fixed most of the issues, implemented the missing features. I was able to reuse some code from Blake Stone, but I still had a lot of issues with the speed. For example I had to make the scalers mostly 16-bit fixed point, but fortunately this didn't have a big impact on the graphics at 320x200. One advantage Wolf3D has over Blake Stone is that it doesn't draw any sprites outside the 3D view area, so all the 2D graphics around it can be native bitmaps, only the 3D view uses chunky. As expected the biggest roadblock turned out to be the raycaster. I tried a 16-bit variant, but it wasn't much faster and produced a lot of glitches due to the lack of precision. I ended up settling for halving the horizontal resolution, so the 3D view is drawn in 2x1. Then again the official GBA port of Wolf3D was also in 2x1, and that's more powerful system so I don't think it's a bad result.

Links :1) Source  2) Download (first version)